DOS

The international news of BBC (BBC Mundo – “El cyberataque más fuerte que reduce la velocidad de internet”) published an article about the biggest DOS (Denial Of Service) attack so far. The attack is being performed by the web organization Cyberbunker towards the not for profit organization Spamhaus, which specializes in filtering of sites suspected of malicious web activity (spam, viruses, etc). Spamhaus is a trusted organization used by thousands of organizations and individuals as a source for information on such sites and domains. Since it is widely employed as a reference for many of the email filtering programs (like Spamassassin and open source spam filtering program), the overall traffic of messaging and web access is being slowed by this attack.

According to the article, the largest attack previous to this was of 100Mbits per second (1000 times faster than many mobile internet connections). However, Cyberbunker`s attack is in the order of 300Mbits per second with a modality of DOS known as distributed DOS (DDOS). The attack, Cyberbunker spoke person argued, is a result of Spamhaus listing their sites as source of malicious code. The attack, according to Spamhaus, has been going on for more than a week and is still currently in process.

After seeing this news, I found out that the German operator Deutsche Telekom is operating a site (sicherheitstacho.eu) to visualize attacks in real time around the world and their source country. I was not surprised to find the Russian Federation as the number one attacking country, since this activity has been going on from Russia for quite some time. However, my surprise was to find Taiwan as the second largest attacking country in the world. I am not sure what are the parameters used to measure the origin of attack, but certainly it is a surprise.